Ecuador has fined seven media companies for not publishing a story that it deemed of public interest.

The state’s media watchdog said the press had a duty to cover a story about the supposed offshore dealings of opposition politician and recent presidential candidate Guillermo Lasso.

The investigation was published in an Argentine newspaper in March.

The watchdog and the media companies have accused each other of censorship. Appeals are under way.

The ruling was made against newspapers El Comercio, La Hora, Expreso and El Universo, and television channels Televicentro, Teleamazonas and Ecuavisa.
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The report, “Lasso: the offshore tycoon”, was first published by Argentina’s left-wing Pagina 12 newspaper, and was picked up by various other Ecuadorean news outlets ahead of the country’s election on 2 April.

The Committee to Protect Journalists asserts that “No government anywhere, including in Ecuador, has any business telling the news media what to cover,” and reports,

In defending its actions before Supercom, lawyers for El Comercioargued that the original Página/12 story was poorly reported, failed to include a response from Lasso, and that publishing the unverified allegations would have violated an Ecuadoran law barring media from promoting or denigrating candidates immediately before elections.

“Peace will prevail,” the former bus driver says in one video as he drives other ruling-party officials through a middle-class neighborhood in his car. The footage inadvertently shows them cruising past graffiti that calls the president a “murderer of students,” an apparent reference to some of the people killed in numerous clashes between demonstrators and security forces.

“With Montalbán neighbors, sharing ideas and betting with the middle class for peace and coexistence.”

Why did the crab cross the road? To get to the Bay of Pigs, apparently. Cuba’s roads are currently “carpeted” with red, black, and yellow land crabs on their annual migration to spawn by the sea, according to Reuters.

Each year, shortly after the island’s first spring rainfall, crabs scuttle by the millions from the forest to the southern coast to lay eggs. They come out daily at dusk and dawn, and cover the roads surrounding the bay. Unfortunately, their numbers are so great that many are inevitably run over. Their shells are sharp enough to puncture motorists’ tires though, which is bad news for visitors but good news for local businesses: Tourists are willing to pay $10 to repair their crab-popped tires, which is nearly half of the state’s average $25 monthly salary, says Reuters.

Because nothing leads to “honest, inclusive conversations” that reduce suspicion which bring about “authentic healing” like denying men of any race their unalienable rights to vote, to own property, to legal representation and to anything that Marxists don’t agree with.